It's the new punk rock, I find myself thinking, as the mosh-pit throngs with excited fans. A thousand people jostle for space in the packed venue and scream and cheer as the main event begins. The sound is deafening, the enthusiasm infectious.

I'm not at a rock gig though: this is a live Diggnation, the cult weekly podcast hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. They're likable individuals with a captivating (if laddish) onscreen presence, and on stage they feed off their live audience. But what struck me as impressive was not their jovial personalities, or the crowd's enthusiasm for the hosts, or even the queue for the event, which stretched for blocks - instead, it was the devotion to the brand behind it all: Digg.

To these folk, Digg is not just another tech site. Because they themselves contribute to it with links and stories that they recommend to others, it's theirs. Any mention of its name and the crowd went wild; there were scuffles as the audience quite literally fought for the Digg freebies being volleyed out over their heads.

As Rose threw Digg stickers into the cheering New York mass, he looked like any geeky boy from the Valley, not the so-called "poster boy of web 2.0" who, as the founder of Digg, was on the cover of Business Week magazine in 2006 under the strapline: "How this kid made $60 million in 18 months." Beer in hand, laptop on his lap and a wide grin on his face, it's clear how much he loves what he's created - and the fans love him for it too.

Just before the show, I managed to grab Rose to find out where Digg is at now and what future he sees for it. What's striking is his passion for Digg, not just as a business, but also as an idea that he truly believes in.

Can you Digg it?

The social bookmarking site began in 2004 and offers a way for users to contribute and share news stories and items of interest with others; the most popular get the most "Diggs", highlighted on the front page. It now gets 26 million unique visitors a month, with 3 million registered editors (people who submit, share and vote on, ie Digg, stories and links). That's no mean feat for an idea dreamed up while its founder was showering one morning.

Why is it so popular? "People want to have a voice and a say in what is news," Rose anwers. "We've levelled the playing field by accepting all other forms of content, whether it's sources from CNN, the Guardian ... it's about seeing what the masses want to surface, which articles they are finding the most interesting, and oftentimes they unearth and promote stories to the front page that you wouldn't find anywhere else; that would be buried on a traditional news site."

Is Digg his main source of news then? "It is the distinct flavour of the community that gets me excited about going back to the front page. That's not to mean that I don't go off and surf my favourite tech blogs or Salon.com or whatever: I have a whole list of Google Reader RSS feeds that I go through - and if I find something interesting, I'll submit it to Digg. That's the beauty of it: I can share it back with the community. The democratic approach to news is a very valuable thing." But, he adds: "We're always going to be dependent on the quality of reporting of mainstream media."

So if it's not an alternative to mainstream media, what else is Digg offering? "We're creating algorithms that take a look at what you've dug and compare it to other people, inside the system, in real time. We have this working on our staging servers right now - it's not something that we've launched publicly - but essentially, when you Digg an item you're agreeing with that item and all those other people who dug it. So let's say you're Digg number 4,000 on something: who are those other 3,999 people you agreed with? What we're doing with the math behind the scenes is we're saying 'OK, you agree with all these other people, what else are they finding out there that you might like? That you might also find interesting? So we're working on ways to surface those stories - to find quality content before it becomes popular - but also introduce you to new people based on what you've been Digging."

So Digg will incorporate social networking for its users alongside their bookmarking of items? Yes, says Rose: "That's [going to be] something that's unique to Digg that you won't find anywhere else, and it's going to be a cool experience: you won't be able to do that on any other news site."

With that in mind, will Digg's user-submitted methodology become a standard for other companies or websites to employ to obtain feedback? Rose nods. "Digg will serve as a means of gathering metrics for third party websites, providing them insights into who's digging their content, who they are spreading it to. We want to enable publishers to have a better idea of which authors are most popular on their site; which content types are striking a core with their readers, and I think we'll provide those tools for them."

Will Digg be branching out beyond its original home then? Will it expand into a more mobile medium? "We're looking into ways of digging all types of content ... right now it's bound into web-based articles, news, images, that type of stuff," he said, smiling evasively, "So, we'll see ..."

Digging for gold

With so many other 2.0 companies being sold recently, will Rose float Digg? Sell it? How will Digg make money? He smiles, somewhat warily. "If there ever becomes a partner that can help us achieve our goals and where two plus two equals 10, then that is something that I would consider. Right now we're happy going it alone."

I sense that the "when are you going to sell Digg?" question is something Rose hears on a daily basis, given how many of his contemporaries are selling up. But if, like Facebook, Digg will offer targeted advertising, based on users' interests, and since content will soon be suggested based on the previous stories and links that Digg users made favourites of or dug, and combined with the plan to create social connections between users based on shared Diggs - surely this will provide a way to make money. Equally, media organisations might like - and pay for - the data on who's Digging their content.

Rose's focus though, remains with what the site offers to its users. He gets most animated when talking about Digg's interactivity and its "community". "Any time you can work with the community and stay active and in touch with the community, the better. I'm trying to get out there and be in touch with people who use our service. The best thing I can do is get constant feedback from the community. They help us shape our products, they tell us when we're screwing up; and we've screwed up." (Rose bowed to user revolt in May last year after the code to crack HD DVDs was repeatedly posted - strictly, illegally - on the site, repeatedly removed by Digg's admins, and reposted.)

"You can't just say, 'We're doing our own thing'... when something's bad on you; you have to say, 'That's bad on me and I'll do anything I can to correct it' and that's the two-way conversation that's happening now in media and the people that do that embrace that. So that's something we've opened up over time; when we first launched Digg it wasn't like that, but now we realise there's so much value in that, that it just is the thing to do."

Besides wanting to "turn Digg into a verb", Rose's original ambition, he says, was to create something people would enjoy and to just be able to cover his rent. I assume he's achieved the latter. As for the former, the screaming crowds awaiting his arrival downstairs seems to prove that.